


Holy Sick Divine Night

by apollos



Series: all the times in-between [4]
Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Coda, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, No Smut, Revenge Sex, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, eating disorder mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-11-02 01:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20580389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Mac, a truck driver, Dennis, Chase Utley. Post 6x11, "The Gang Gets Stranded in the Woods."





	Holy Sick Divine Night

**Author's Note:**

> title from lorde's "sober ii (melodrama)" which is an excellent macdennis song in general

At first, Dennis doesn't mind the lack of Mac's calls. It's easy to forget when the casino circles in around him, all the bright lights and loud noises and Charlie winning time after time in a place where law knows no man and man knows no law. Then, of course, Dennis and Charlie get smashed with the baseball players and Dennis probably forgets Mac's name, sees him as just an outline of a person in his life, thinks, _gotta get him this pic of Chase Utley, gotta make him jealous_, unsure even then of who he's thinking of, of what the motive is. Only as Dennis and Charlie make it back to Philly and Dennis drags his empty, drunken husk of a body into bed does he think: _Huh. Something's wrong._

Something pools in Mac's stomach when Dee and Frank push him against the trucker guy, a nauseous arousal. He knows right off the bat, who this guy is, and what he thinks Mac is; Mac has been around this game, only once or twice, only in the darkest nights when Dennis was getting drunk and banging chicks in the Frat House, forgetting to call Mac for too long—no, forget that. He needs to focus on the task at hand.

His shoe bumps against something on the floorboard. He bends over, sticks his hands between his leg to fish it up.. A man's suit jacket. The smell hits him, knocks the wind out of his chest after that hellish experience in the woods: this is Dennis's jacket. He looks in the pocket and finds Dennis's wallet, his driver's license, confirms it.

"What the hell?" He holds the jacket up and shakes it in front of the truck driver's face. "What the hell is this, man?"

"Is that Dennis's jacket!?" Dee screeches.

"Holy shit, this guy _murdered _Dennis," Frank adds. He scoots back, flattening Dee against the door. "Charlie too, probably! Oh, fuck! We gotta get out of here, Deandra."

"Oh, guys, no, no," the truck driver says, shooting them a smile. Skeevy, it flips Mac's stomach. "Were those two your friends? I thought they were lot lizards."

"Oh, Jesus." Frank eases off of Dee.

"We're not—lot lizards," Dee says, her eyes crossing in the way that they do when she starts to feel nervous. "I'm _pregnant_, asshole."

"Dee," Mac says, voice more serious than necessary. He balls Dennis's jacket in his hand. "I don't think he'd want _you_."

"Well, Mac, I _know _you guys think I'm _very _ugly—"

"He's gay, Deandra!" Frank screams into the silence.

Mac's stomach flips again. He brings the jacket into his chest and haunches over it, ready to retch. _He's gay, he's gay, he's gay. _But it's not him they're talking about—_it's him they're talking about_—it's the truck driver.

"You got me there." The man pulls his hands off the wheels and lifts them up. "Only one of you in this car is my type, if you know what I mean."

"I know what you mean," Mac says. He sits back but keeps the suit jacket balled up tight to his chest. He knows Dee and Frank are looking at him, looking at the jacket. He doesn't care. When Frank and Dee get out at the casino, and Mac stays, and the truck diver starts taking them the two of them into a seedy-looking part of the city dotted with liquor stores and flat motels, he doesn't care. Free from their eyes, he takes the jacket to his face and inhales, right on the collar. Dennis splashes cologne around his neck, like a woman, and it smells of him the mostly strongly there.

The truck driver gives him a look, and instead of the weird smile he's been giving Mac this whole ride, he looks sad. Understanding. Mac wants to punch the guy.

Mac doesn't punch the guy. He gets out at a selected motel with him, stupid eighteen-wheeler so inconspicuous in the parking lot. When he was twenty, shaking in his combat boots and muscle teas and all wide brown eyes, he just lingered down by a liquor store for a while, one he knew he wouldn't find anybody he knew at, until he found a guy—you can always find a guy—and asked him to buy him some beer. Then asked to drink that beer with him. A simple way to go about it. Discrete, tasteful, and the best thing was, he could drink enough to forget the details. Just wake up in the morning in the back of his car at some quarry or abandoned parking lot and know and ask for God's forgiveness.

This is not like that, though. He can't go to the desk with the guy, and he can't stay by this truck, so instead he walks to the edge of the lot and stares out into the street. The sun beats into his eyes. He sways; he's so hungry, his stomach so empty. He thinks of Dennis. He slips Dennis's suit jacket on. Armor, he tells himself. I am not me, he tells himself.

"Hey!" He turns around and sees the truck driver, holding keys out. "You coming?"

Mac kicks at some dirt in the dingy little strip between parking lot and road and thinks about running into the street. This whole goddamned thing because he'd saved a squirrel—somewhere, inside of him, he knows nobody would swerve to save him. _You're being fucking dramatic, Mac, _the voice in his head (sounds like Dennis) screams at him. _You're being a pussy._

The room at the motel is what Mac expects it to be, what Mac has always seen: stained carpet, ugly art on the wall, outdated television, a thin and used comforter that was maybe sort of nice thirty years ago on the bed with a floral pattern of stained wilting flowers. Mac sits on it while the truck driver paces about, goes into the bathroom to take a piss. That nauseous arousal is back, his body deciding whether to puke or pop a boner. It's the latter. It's always the latter.

"Who is he?" the guy asks when he comes out of the bathroom, the motel room toilet gurgling and lurching behind him. "The guy. The pretty one."

"That's none of your damn business," Mac says. He realizes his jaw his tight, doesn't unclench it. He is not twenty any more, he doesn't need to play—doesn't feel like he is—an innocent, a novice, taken advantage of by the Devil and the Devil on earth wearing the skin of men. "We gonna do this or not?"

The truck driver smiles at him, reaches down to undo his belt. "I didn't catch your name."

"No. I don't want to know yours, either." _That isn't how we do this, and you know that._

After, he tries to pay Mac. Mac sighs; they always try to pay him. He let them, sometimes, when he was younger and he needed the money. (Dennis, gone for days at a time, not paying for Mac under some flimsy half-excuse they both pretended to believe in.) He just shakes his head and leaves the bed, rebuttoning his shirt. Dennis's jacket, safe and draped over the lone chair with stuffing poking out of its ripped upholstery. He pulls it on again. He shudders and thinks of Dennis's arm around his shoulder, guiding him.

"I paid for the night," the truck driver says. His voice sounds a million miles away, down a mineshaft, a ghost.

"I'm sure you did." Mac ties the laces on his shoes.

He's about to leave when he turns around and sees the truck driver, so pathetic, naked, that limp comforter in his lap and his pale, paunchy, sparsely-haired chest. "Go home," Mac says, his voice thick. He's hungry, he's dizzy. "Go to your wife."

The man did not mention a wife, isn't wearing a ring, but Mac knows he isn't wrong when he sees the look on the guy's face.

What knocks him off guard and makes him burst through the room and onto the motel balcony, under the harsh, judgmental sunlight of God's glory: "You, too."

Dennis receives no courtesy notifying him of Mac's arrival. Knowing Atlantic City isn't that far away and that Mac isn't dead (he would feel it if he were) and that he's going to come back eventually (he always comes back) Dennis wakes and stretches and showers and pukes and brushes his teeth and stares into his own eyes. Then, he sets up.

Mac opens the door to the apartment around six in the evening and Dennis is sitting, perfectly angled, beer bottle _so _casually in hand, mouth stretched into that shit-eating grin, and he even starts to lay into Mac until he sees Mac's face, and also that Mac is wearing his jacket.

"Here you go." Mac rips the thing off him—Dennis bites his tongue on a protestation of how _expensive _that was—and into his lap.

It smells like cigarettes, so Dennis says, "Were you smoking?"

"No." Mac keeps his eyes off Dennis, his jaw set. He walks into their kitchen, pours himself a glass of water, and drinks it in one go. The glass lands on the counter with a loud thud. He reaches into a cabinet and takes out a box of pasta, puts the box on the counter, retrieves a pot, pours water in the pot, puts the pot on the stove. Then he grabs an apple from a bowl and leans on the sink, facing away from Dennis. Bites in.

"You're eating it with the skin on," Dennis tests, rising out of the chair and walking over to Mac. "Are you, uh, mad at me? Dude?"

"No." Another crunch of the apple between Mac's teeth, like breaking tiny bones.

Dennis tries to touch the small of Mac's back. Mac flinches away.

"Really? Not for the Chase Utley thing?"

"I said no, Dennis." Mac turns around and throws the apple into the floor. He gags around the rest in his mouth, spits the remains into the sink, skin and all.

"Then what is it?" Dennis is getting nervous. Dennis is backing away.

"You meet a truck driver in Atlantic City, huh?" Mac asks. He grabs onto the counter, looking deranged: hair a mess, shirt untucked from his pants, the stink of cigarettes and sweat rolling off him.

Dennis presses himself against the fridge but smiles and laugh. "Yeah, dude, it was the _craziest _thing, Charlie and I were gonna tell you all about. Hey, you must've met him, too, seeing how you've got my jacket and all. Guess I gotta call the police now, tell 'em the search is off—"

"I fucked him."

Mac kneels at his bed and wraps the rosary between his fingers and ignores how every single cell of his body seems to have been lit on fire. A funeral's pyre.

Still standing in the kitchen, Dennis stares at the apple on the ground. The water on the stove roars at him, tells him it's boiling. What he should do: sweep the apple up, dig the chewed pieces from the sink, dump them in the trash. Pour the entire box of pasta into the pot (no measuring ounces, no counting calories) and make Mac that homemade marinara sauce he likes (Dennis doesn't eat it, only makes it for Mac, only sometimes.) Delete all evidence of meeting Chase Utley from his life. Take his jacket, and Mac's clothes, to a dry cleaner's, and pay for them to be cleaned. Report this back to Mac with the pasta and the marinara sauce. Joke and deflect until Mac loves him again. Never talk about Mac fucking the truck driver. Never talk about Mac fucking anybody at all.

An hour later, the water has boiled itself out and Dennis is still standing in the kitchen.


End file.
